The European Commission – more democratic than the US presidency?

A constant argument of the anti-EU side is that the European Commission is not democratic.

But in the US, the people do not directly elect their president. Sure, they VOTE for the president, but it is the Electoral College which actually makes the final decision. Hence Al Gore getting the majority of the popular vote in 2000, yet not winning the presidency (and that wasn’t a one-off – see also Samuel Tilden getting more than Rutherford Hayes in 1876, Grover Cleveland getting more than Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and even – if you buy the tales of vote fraud – Richard Nixon getting more than John F Kennedy in 1960).

The US president is the top dog of the US executive. The rest of the executive is led by his cabinet. Yet the US cabinet is solely appointed by the president – none of them are elected officials (unlike the UK where, as the executive is part of the legislature, the majority of members of the cabinet are democratically elected MPs). The president’s choice of cabinet then has to be ratified by Congress.

How is this different to the EU system? The Commission has a strong case for being the closest the EU has to an executive. Its president is agreed by representatives of the democratically elected governments of the member states. These representatives are, arguably, equivalent to the United States’ Electoral College voters. The Commission president-elect is then ratified by the democratically-elected European Parliament.

Then, of course, the president of the Commission appoints the commissioners – just as the US president appoints his cabinet. Only the Commission president has no say in who his commissioners are. Instead, the individual (again, democratically-elected) governments of the member states nominate their own commissioners. The Commission president then gives them their various positions. Again, these then have to be ratified by the European Parliament.

At the moment, the major check remains the veto of the various member states, which means that any country can prevent every other country from doing something it doesn’t like. It’s sort of as if each member of the cabinet could veto any government policy they disagree with.

Also, to make an especially imperfect comparison, in effect the European Parliament acts like the House of Lords is meant to in the British parliament, reading through and amending legislation and thus (supposedly) preventing anything too mental from getting passed into law.

Then of course, there’s also scrutiny by the Council of Ministers (technically known as the Council of the European Union – although this should not be confused with the Council of Europe, which is nothing much to do with the EU, or the European Council, which is made up of the heads of the member states and provides an extra layer of scrutiny).

The Council of Ministers usually divides into nine “formations” to analyse and discuss specific policy areas. It’s a vaguely similar idea to parliamentary select committees, only unlike them the council also gets to vote on legislation in its capacity as a supposedly impartial body for scrutinising proposals. The Council as a whole votes, and usually has to do so unanimously (qualified majority voting applies in certain areas, but this has to be a majority both of member states and the EU population, making it tricky to force things through).

On top of that, you have the various legal institutions which could, like in Britain, rule that EU policies are against the law, and thus force another revision.

In the US, cabinet appointees all have to be ratified by the (democratically elected) Congress, just as European Commissioners have to be ratified by the European Parliament. Yet, arguably, for the US cabinet to have the same legitimacy as the European Commission, each (democratically elected) government of each US state would have to have the right to appoint its own cabinet member. So instead of Condi, Rumsfeld and the like, we’d have a bunch of people appointed by the state governments of Wisconsin, Idaho, South Carolina and the rest all vying for the president’s attention. That would, technically, be more democratic than the current system, where the president’s mates get all the best positions whether they’ve ever held elected office or not.

So then, considering that the president of the European Commision is chosen by agreement between the democratically elected representatives of the EU states, the commissioners are appinted by the democratically elected governments of the EU states, and both the president and the commissioners are confirmed in their positions by the democratically elected European Parliament, isn’t the European Commission more democratic than the American executive, in which not even the president necessarily has to have a majority of voters behind him?